


Servants of the Empire

by inlovewithnight



Category: King Arthur (2004)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-20
Updated: 2006-01-20
Packaged: 2017-10-15 13:19:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight





	Servants of the Empire

(One)  
This was Britain: cold and dark, and broken up by hills and forests instead of rolling out the way land ought to so that a man could let his horse chase the wind over the grasses from morning till night and never reach the end. Here, the clouds pressed down low to the earth, and the sun was veiled; to children of a people who worshipped that sun, it was akin to hell.

They were children no longer here, but knights in training, and the training itself was another way that Britain was hell. The young knights slept in a single long room termed the kennel by their teachers—what was left of the last batch of Sarmatian conscripts. With three years of service remaining before they could leave Britain, they’d been burdened with the task of training up their successors. They cursed the boys as they cursed the land they guarded, with no pity or compassion in their hearts for either.

Thirty-one boys, from all the tribes of Sarmatia. It had been thirty-two, but one had gone over the side on the crossing. Jumped, fell, or was pushed into the sea; only Lancelot had been close enough to witness, and he had said nothing, even when the Romans beat him bloody for his silence. No one else ever did learn the truth of it, or the boy’s name.

Thirty-one boys, who the Roman decrees stated could be no younger than fourteen summers so that three years of training would produce a man capable of wielding a sword and defending this land. One of the group, Gawain, couldn’t have been more than eleven, but neither the Romans nor the old knights cared. They simply needed bodies, young and strong, to fill the kennel and then to guard the Wall when their elders earned their freedom and went east, out of this hell and home.

(Two)  
The old knights had paired them off on the first day, telling each boy that his partner was his shield-brother, and that until the day he left Britain or died—and he should expect to die—he would guard his brother’s back as if it were his own. They would share the same fate, too, should either ever shirk or err. _Your brother’s life is yours, and your life belongs to him,_ the old knights said. _Never forget it._

So they bonded brother to brother, partly for the sake of survival: they’d learned from the moment they reached the Wall that it was by far best to do whatever the old knights told them. And partly because it was practical: two sharing a blanket was warmer than one, and an extra set of eyes could greatly raise the odds of either boy making it from training to meals to the kennel without being dragged into a dark corner by a superior looking for sport.

And partly it was because speaking to no one and guarding against everyone was a sure way to go mad, like Gaheris, who opened up his wrists with the dagger he was supposed to be sharpening, or Cador, who walked out in front of a knight exercising a warhorse at full gallop.

Those two were put under the earth within a week of each other, and the remaining young knights drew closer together, something stubborn taking root in their hearts. They wouldn’t give up; they wouldn’t give the bastards the satisfaction. “Sun God knows there are enough Romans to spare,” Lancelot said one night, the first words any but his shield-brother Aristant had heard him speak of his own volition. “I’d like to see the lot of _them_ in hell before any more of us.”

(Three)  
At night, the kennel was cold as a grave. They slept on split-pine benches, two boys and one blanket to each. There was a fire at one end of the room, and they’d fought each other bloody and ragged over who got banished to the far benches away from the feeble heat. The fighting lasted until Aristant told them to stop.

There was no reason they ought to listen to him—he was the son of a chief, but so were two or three others, and anyway just because his father had been chosen by the war-council didn’t give _him_ any merit. But Aristant was the strongest, and even if he hadn’t been, he had Lancelot at his back. And Lancelot left most of the boys shuffling and silent.

He must have shaman blood, some of them whispered, or perhaps his mother was touched by spirits before he was born. There was no other explanation for his cold eyes and hard fists, or for how he never cried, no matter what the Romans and the old knights did to him. Lancelot’s superiors had marked him as dangerous at first sight, just as his comrades had; the difference, of course, was that while that danger caused the other boys to give him a wide berth, the knights and Romans took it as a challenge to break him. But even on the occasions that he had to drag himself back to the kennel on hands and knees, no one ever saw Lancelot show any sign of hurt. Perhaps his shield-brother Aristant might have seen cracks in the mask, but if so he never spoke of it.

Others came crawling back from time to time, and when they did, it was often weeping. Perhaps most often it was young Gawain, who was too small to rightly be on that island at all. His shield-brother Galahad would bring their blanket from the bench and curl up with him there on the floor, up close to the dull ashes of the fire. And singly or by pairs, the others would slip from their benches and join them, until twenty-nine young creatures—not children but not yet warriors—lay tucked in close as wolf pups in the den, sleeping away the bitter hours till morning and keeping the ugly specters of the night at bay.

(Four)  
Thirty-one boys, at the beginning; the number didn’t split evenly into pairs. There’d been one left without a brother to watch his back, and they saw Erec put under the earth by the end of the first year. They managed some sorrow for him, at least, more than for the nameless one lost on the crossing or for the two who’d lost hope and left them so early, still strangers.

They’d known Erec, and his death was ugly besides, beaten until he broke by a drunken infantryman from a fort far west along the Wall. There was no chance of the soldier ever being punished; the fort’s garrison was just passing through Camboglanna as the Romans pulled their forces back toward Londinium. They were leaving Britain, bit by bit, scattering garbage and bodies on the ground behind them. The sword Erec had hardly been able to lift was thrust down into a mound of dirt in the graveyard, and that was the end of him.

The first death of a brother, of a boy that their slowly-forming company could call _one of us_. Far from the last, though. By the turn of the next year, three more had been lost. One death was a training accident: Lionel, who broke his neck in a fall from a war-horse. But then came summer, and fever rose from the swamps and raced across the land to meet them. They were fortunate to bury only two. Kay by chance had been Lionel’s partner, and in death restored their balance. But then the disease claimed Griflet, and Tristan made his bedroll alone.

The third year their luck was better, and there were no funerals at all. On the day that the old knights rode to the sea, there were twenty-five newly-minted soldiers to take up the task of guarding that stretch of Hadrian’s Wall. At the next year’s turning, twenty-five still. Word came a bare month later that by midsummer, they’d have a commander of their own, that their leader-by-birthright Artorius Castus had almost finished his training in the far south. A month after that, fever streaked through Camboglanna again, and carried off another. At least Aristant’s sword had tasted blood before Lancelot drove it into his grave.

(Five)  
The new commander did not instantly impress his knights. The first thing any of them saw of him was when he stormed up to them in the stable yard and demanded to know why they weren’t interfering on behalf of their comrade, who was being beaten senseless by two Roman foot-soldiers at the time.

Caradoc and Galahad offered the most obvious of reasons: that it was not _their_ place as servants of the Empire to interfere with Roman efforts to teach a conscript his manners. And while the complete failure of all similar efforts over the four and a half years they’d spent in Britain did not bode well for the infantrymen’s success, they did of course have a right to expend their energy as they saw fit.

The man they would soon learn to call Arthur declared that he would put a stop to it, and took three strides across the yard before a low voice stopped him in his tracks. “He won’t thank you,” Dagonet said, squinting at the little tableaux of violence. As was his way, he didn’t waste breath disputing Arthur’s sharp rejoinder of disbelief, only shrugged and resumed his watching.

And as was also common, his shield-brother picked up the verbal sword for him. “Nah, won’t thank you one bit for sending them back to the barracks,” Bors said, grinning at the new commander who didn’t know the way of things. “Lancelot _likes_ to fight.” He paused a moment, weighing his next words. When he spoke them, he wasn’t smiling anymore, but staring into Arthur’s eyes with an expression very like a warning. “Especially your kind.”

(Six)  
Once they realized that it wasn’t just another deceptive Roman mask and that Arthur was sincere in his interest, they began to answer his questions. They told him about the sky in Sarmatia, the terrifying beauty of a storm sweeping across it from horizon to horizon, the way the Sun God’s eye kept watch over the earth from endless perfect blue. They hid smiles at his uncomfortable questions about the god of their childhood, rarely mentioned by most of them when it was easier to swear by the Romans’ Mithras. But they answered him, as best as time-faded memories would allow. It was strange, speaking of a god of vast and windswept places in this land of clouds and hills.

He offered to let them conduct their own rites of worship, if they wished to, and that left them in shocked silence for a very long moment before Caradoc explained that none of them was initiated to carry out the rituals even if they could remember them. “And besides,” Lancelot added in the cutting tone he used when he thought Arthur foolish, “we can’t spare a horse for the sacrifice, can we, not when the last foaling was so bad.”

The disjointed memories of the great yearly bonfires, the shriek of the holy beast as the shaman cut its throat and the shouts of the gathered warriors, left them all uncertain and tense. Were these blurred and vague things memory at all, or dreams of a life that never truly was? They gladly turned to Arthur’s next question, about why the knights from Sarmatia neither looked nor spoke as one people. “We come from many tribes,” Bors explained, gesturing at his fellows. “At home, we’d all be at war and trying to kill each other. Lancelot’s people and mine, for one—ancient enemies. From the dawn of time. Every time he stops a sword from ending my piece of a life, it just twists him up in his guts, doesn’t it, Lancelot?”

“Someday I won't stop one,” came the reply without a second’s hesitation. Lancelot wore his sharp-edged smile, the one that had made them all shiver when they were just boys and had thought he was spirit-touched. Those beliefs had been worn out of them over time, but nothing ever replaced them or was needed to. Lancelot simply _was_ , just as nature had made him, and it had become their custom to give him his way. Arthur was the only one who didn’t seem to know it.

(Seven)  
Years twisted on years and burial mounds filled up the graveyard, swords standing proudly over them in a parody of victory. One by one they fell in battle: Caradoc and Constantine, Lamorak and Agravaine and Tors. Others were carried off by fever carried in twos or threes. “We could have stayed home and died of _fever_ ,” Galahad remarked when they buried Percival. “The Romans didn’t need us here for that.”

The fever-deaths they could take with a dose of bitter humor, could see as a joke of the gods who so very clearly favored Rome. The battle-deaths were different, were harder. Who was to blame for those, the gods or the Woads or the Romans? It was impossible to know, and so it was impossible to know whom to hate, as they rode silently back toward the fort with bloody swords at their sides and dead comrades slung over empty saddles.

At the end of the tenth year, when they carried Gingalain home behind them, Geraint announced that he would claim the dead man’s warhorse. Given that they were bone-weary and halfway home from battle, it wasn’t entirely surprising that no one saw Lancelot moving until he’d flung himself from his horse and borne Geraint to the ground with his own weight and momentum. And given their weariness and their long-held caution toward Lancelot, it was even less surprising that no one moved to stop him from choking the other knight and driving his face into the earth. Except for Arthur.

The Commander caught Lancelot’s shoulder and hauled him to his feet. He didn’t retreat an inch when Lancelot swung around to face him, didn’t flinch from the man’s bloodstreaked face or the wild rage that made his entire body shake. He and Lancelot stared at each other for a long moment, until the knight muttered “That’s Gingalain’s horse, Arthur. She doesn’t belong to Geraint. Tell him.” Arthur nodded once, and it was over. There was no need to speak, then or on the ride back to the fort. And when Gingalain’s mare bore her first foal in the spring, there was no question that it would go to any knight but Lancelot. Geraint was under Britain’s sod by that time anyway.

(Eight)  
Arthur told them once of one of the texts of the Romans that dealt with the Sarmatians, attempting to explain the people and their ways to the officers and governors who labored keep barbarian heads properly bowed to Rome. “It said that you are trained to use horses almost from your birth, and that you think it beneath you to walk,” he said, smiling slightly.

His smile faded when it was not returned, and they explained that yes, of course it was beneath a man to walk if he could ride, that if he proved himself worthy of their birthright as a people—worthy of a horse’s submission to his will—then why should he lower himself by treading the dirt?

Arthur didn’t understand, they could see that, and perhaps they should have expected it. He hadn’t been born in a tent or a wagon, hadn’t been rocked to sleep by the swaying stride of his mother’s gelding as the clan moved across the steppe under the sun’s eye. He didn’t know that the spirits of brave warriors resided in the string of horses he cared for so conscientiously but emptily. Arthur treated his mounts with respect, but no reverence. He did not duck his head to mingle his breath with that of his horse before riding out on patrol; he didn’t kneel in the dew to be sure that he would be the first living thing seen by each foal he’d marked as his own.

In the spring of the twelfth year, the remaining knights at last asked him to come down to the broodmares' paddocks and join them in their foaling vigil. The heavy mares had to be kept penned up close to keep them safe from the Woads, but they still sought what privacy they could when their times came, slipping away from the others and into the dark. The knights sat in a loose circle on blankets spread over the damp grass, passing a wine jug back and forth, tending to weapons and armor, trading stories and insults, and waiting.

(Nine)  
“They remember, you know,” Dagonet said at midnight on the second night of watching. “All of the horses, they remember the homeland as well as we do.”

“They were all foaled here in Britain, and at least three generations back besides,” Arthur protested. “Most of them have British stock in their blood as well; how could they know anything of Sarmatia?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Lancelot said, looking out past their small circle to the slow-moving, graceful shapes in the dark. “It’s where the first horses came from, where their spirits are. However far they go, they’ll always be called home at the end of the day.”

They all fell quiet, sitting in the waning moonlight. Without intent they’d wound up close together, each touching the next man in one small way or another—shoulder leaning heavily to shoulder, or the back of a hand resting against a leg. Gentle contact, binding the knights together as they waited for the cycle of life to turn again and new young creatures to come into the world, perhaps carrying the souls of their departed brothers. Far from home and in a land that gave them little but grief, still some things were constant: the loyalty between them and the persistence of hope, as long as life endured.  



End file.
